Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

https://sifted.eu/articles/stability-ai-fundraise-leak/

by mjaques • 3 years ago

111 66 3 years ago

sifted.eu

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Doesn’t look like fraud but likely lower the valuation unless they can overcome the ip issue

esafak2• 3 years ago

Now they'll have to work harder to make it up for the next round. There's no free money.

amrrs• 3 years ago

I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion. In fact the first stable diffusion model on Hugging Face is under CompVis Org.

They had an issue with Runway with a model takedown or something but I think that was sorted out later on.

I don't know why the article seems desparately trying to show Stability in bad light while they have in fact funded a lot of AI model development and helped release it with permissive licence

ShamelessC6• 3 years ago

I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion

This article makes no such claim. It is about whether or not investors knew.

Jaymz87• 3 years ago

Investors probably shouldn't be chucking $100m+ at startups without doing the bare minimum of DD if that's the point of contention here...

kevinventullo• 3 years ago

Oh, those poor investors! It would be absolutely unreasonable to expect them to evaluate the business fundamentals of their investments; it’s not as if that’s literally their entire job.

algo_trader2• 3 years ago

Emad also put up ~$20M of his own (real!) money for the initial compute. And released everything as OSS.

Its just sad to see such a negative article.

There are, however, fair questions about valuation and (lack of) moat.

ad404b8a372f2b92• 3 years ago

Some of their behaviour over the past year makes me feel the company has a culture which doesn't hold honesty as a core value.

The Runway takedown or something your refer to was Stability sending a takedown request to HuggingFace claiming an IP leak over the publication of version 1.5 by their academic partners Runway. That was sorted out, if you want to call it that, after massive public outcry and Emad claiming it was just confusion on HuggingFace's part. HuggingFace then confirmed Stability's legal team contacted them to retract the request afterward.

Then there was the incident where they contacted Discord to take over the main StableDifussion channel without informing the owner. There was also the incident where they convinced the owner of the main stable diffusion subreddit to give them mod rights and removed all other mods as well as any info and mentions related to one of the most widely used StableDiffusion tool (Automatic1111).

emadm7• 3 years ago

I normally don't like engaging in these things but think should step in given increasing fud.

Stability AI lawyers never contacted HuggingFace requesting an IP takedown. You may ask HuggingFace themselves.

RunwayML agreed not to release 1.5 for safety reasons in writing and then chose to anyone presumably leading to confusion by our tech team who let HF know it couldn't be them.

You can ask them why they did that, Runway being a private company https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/12/05/runway-ml...

Three of the 5 authors of latent diffusion including the two lead authors are at Stability AI.

On the Discord it was Discord themselves that did it to the puzzlement of Kaarsetun and I, we are good with each other.

On the Subreddit that was our fault completely, for which I did a public apology around the issues with Automatic1111.

ericflo• 3 years ago

I think in the world of ML, contributing that much compute should count as co-creation. There is a lot of code published by academia that just needs compute and data, but they don't receive it. Stability deserves credit for Doing the Thing. IP rights are another thing but that's a whole subtree of legal questions that society is barreling towards.

ShamelessC6• 3 years ago

IP rights are another thing

Actually the _only_ thing in contention per the article.

anonylizard4• 3 years ago

People have to remember, back in 2022-08, AI was still not a big thing. DALLE-2 was only released 2 months ago, and was just a quickly forgotten novelty.

Emad had to have funded the training of SD even before DALLE-2, investing the cash in exchange for branding rights to a free model.

Its obviously an extremely good bet in retrospect (RunwayML is probably bleeding with regret), giving stability herculean name recognition despite not having done any high profile research themselves. But when the bet was made, it was quite an insane bet requiring a lot of vision.

emadm7• 3 years ago

Most of the latent and stable diffusion authors also work at Stability AI, as do many other generative AI research leaders in media.

Naming rights on the model were no part of the compute grant, we give them incredibly freely and also support. Naming was suggested by the researchers in this case.

We don't just put out compute, but made sure to clear up everything from Stable Diffusion 2 onwards 100% trained by Robin and team: https://github.com/Stability-AI/stablediffusion

nostromo• 3 years ago

Lying and fraud aren’t ok, and founders should be held to account for that.

But this doesn’t seem like that. It seems like any disappointed investors just didn’t do the bare minimum you’d expect with an investment of $100m.

gojomo• 3 years ago

There's no report from any investors who suggest they were confused about IP/original-work in any way. There is an assertion to the contrary in the article: "Stability told Sifted that the investors that backed the company were fully aware of Stable Diffusion’s IP ownership."

So while it's possible investors just don't want to admit they didn't look too deep, it's also possible everyone relevant knew exactly what was being offered: a fast-moving team of opportunists, adapting core tech originating elsewhere. That alone is plenty valuable in a hot area. 'Fast-followers', rollups, & integrators can do great in a tech boom.

So, this story might mainly be resentful competitors/employees taking potshots. (Or maybe even: potential next-round investors trying to win for themselves a lower-valuation via media spin.)

EGreg• 3 years ago

Someone help me understand this… the code is open source, so does this mean it’s actually proprietary and we can’t use it?

And if it is indeed open source with a completely permissive license, then what material difference does it make who originally developed it?

neximo642• 3 years ago

What is the story here? Stability funded a model that came off the LMU paper?

They certainly did that better than the way OpenAI did, or Midjourney did.

ShamelessC6• 3 years ago

That they funded the model is not in question. It is that they claimed they owned the IP to said model in pitches/messaging to investors when they in fact, did not.

neximo642• 3 years ago

Yes, even if they did do that which they didn't, that is also what OpenAI, etc do with their models like GPT and Dall-E when infact they come off papers like Transformers is all you need and the same LMU paper.

Stability has done it better since they purposely acknowledge the researchers instead of the way the public domain research is just used to make their own model with no acknowledgements (no co created mention anywhere). OpenAI would say 'co created by Google' if they did.

capableweb9• 3 years ago

they claimed they owned the IP to said model in pitches/messaging

Where is the evidence of this? The article certainly doesn't contain anything that proves they claimed the owned the IP.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 3 years ago

Dumb hit-piece, Stability's contribution was vital to the creation of those models. Article doesn't even make the claim that the investors were confused on if Stability owned the models, it just insinuates they were for absolutely no reason.

eachro• 3 years ago

There is absolutely a reason ...

KaoruAoiShiho2• 3 years ago

What reason? Did they have an investor tell them they were misled? It's not in the article. Did Stability hide anything about who made the models? Again not in the article. It's content-less insinuations.

capableweb9• 3 years ago

The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and Stability AI

Then Stability AI raised money from investors in October 2022.

Are you really telling me these investors didn't even do any sort of due diligence (not even "barely any" but literally any at all), didn't realized that Stable Diffusion was the work of many, and checked the license of the model and code?

That's a bit far fetched, to be honest.

Supposedly, this "leaked pitch deck" is supposed to show us that they lied to investors, but where is the pitch deck itself? Seemingly, only one of the slides is in the article, how could anyone reach any sort of conclusion based on just one slide?

Edit: The article seems to be some sort of clickbait trash that is so rampant around the web... One selected part:

The Stable Diffusion code was released by researchers at LMU Munich in April 2022.

Links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752 which is the Version 2 of the paper, indeed released in April 2022. However, that paper is about, and links to https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion which is not Stable Diffusion, it's Latent Diffusion. Stable Diffusion was released in August 2022, and is at https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion

ShamelessC6• 3 years ago

How is that far fetched? There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations.

And why are you putting leaked pitch deck in quotes?

capableweb9• 3 years ago

How is that far fetched? There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations.

Is there examples of investors investing in a project without even visiting the homepage of the project or trying to understand even 0.1% of what the project is about? I don't think it's super common, but maybe I'm not hanging around the right/wrong circles in SV.

And why are you putting leaked pitch deck in quotes?

AFAIK, this is the only article that mentions a leaked pitch deck from Stability AI and it only includes one image, which puts into question if there really is a leaked pitch deck, or if it's just one image that got sent to them.

rvz2• 3 years ago

There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations.

Exactly. This reminds me of Fast.co [0] who recently shutdown after attempting to raise more VC capital when it was revealed that they only made 600K and with a very high burn rate.

I don't see how it is so difficult for many commenters here to see that investors were mislead by the claims made by Stability.ai's IP, and now they're also are burning cash with questionable revenues being generated whilst begging to VCs again to raise at a higher valuation.

Some of these investors just run into hype and get burned repeatedly and never learn from FOMO.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slo...

algo_trader2• 3 years ago

My pet theory is that Stability was a surprise viral hit during aug/sep. Then got a massive capital round. And NOW, growth is already slowing and investors are getting buyers-remorse?

Or maybe growth is accelerating, and those who passed on series-A are upset?

Or maybe the lizard men are involved?

anonylizard4• 3 years ago

Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base. Their 'growth' is basically dependant on them being able to release open source models that get so popular, unbeatable ecosystems get formed around them.

On this front. SD1.4/1.5 is extremely successful, but there has been no followup. SD2.0 was a total disaster that shocked the community, SD2.1 is still no better than SD1.5. StableLM currently is still a joke in performance. Like, they don't seem to even test their models before releasing them.

Compare their releases, to the polished and immediately dominant releases from OpenAI, and you have to question their researching chops. Did they only succeed with SD1.4 because of collaboration with other companies?

impulser_• 3 years ago

It's definitely not far fetched for VC investors to not do any due diligence at all. Obviously not all of them, but there are quite a bit of them that just gamble with their money. Just take a look at how many of them threw money at crypto lol.

capableweb9• 3 years ago

Yeah, again, how many investors invested in a cryptocurrency company and then not until afterwards realized they invested into a cryptocurrency company? Because that's what the article suggests happened, which is obviously ridiculous.

exizt88• 3 years ago

Another poorly reported hit-piece from Sifted. This is a non-event. Anyone who’s been close to fundraising knows that investors expect founders to build a narrative and do their own due diligence.

sillysaurusx• 3 years ago

Whoa. So I got a DM on Twitter about a week ago thanking me for pushing back on Emad’s claims about cluster pricing. I didn’t really take it seriously (or understand it) till now:

https://i.imgur.com/5XAndrR.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/OAZeZEl.jpg

So for whatever that’s worth, here’s a claim that predates this article by a week that emad was lying about stability origins to investors. I’ve trimmed the name off the DM for obvious reasons, but it’s from someone who seems credible (though I don’t know them).

I don’t like posting random unsubstantiated accusations without context. But this article just provided both.

As for what he lied about (or stretched the truth), I don’t know. I don’t even know if it matters. But this is why I never lie to investors, and why I’ve always really felt negatively towards colleagues who stretch the truth. It’s all kinds of misleading, and it’s a kind of misleading that tends to matter.

It would also make me upset as an investor if I found out that someone had fooled me. So even if it’d be to my advantage to lie for money, I can’t imagine doing it. I’d rather live in relative obscurity.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

Seems like an ungrounded hit piece and it mostly raises questions about who is backing sifted.eu

napier• 3 years ago

What a clumsy half assed hack attempt at a hatchet job.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

what official affiliation there was between Stability and EleutherAI, they said: “None.”

That's wild. Handing out a bunch of cash for nothing except vague association. No control? No equity? No IP?

Reminds me of marketing. Cola puts logos on t-shirts of players and proclaims to have sponsored them, but I have yet to see cola claim to have "co-scored" a goal.

anonylizard4• 3 years ago

All AI companies used to release their top tier research into the open. Google doesn't have control/equity/IP over the transformer paper.

GPT-J and co are GPT-2 equivalents, that are not actually useful in any way. So its more just building up the open source ecosystem.

Stability did get the branding rights to SD1.4, they spent a few million to get incredible name recognition out of nowhere, in the hottest and most competitive tech space ever. Those sponsored alphago tournaments costed way more and had less reputational impact than the millions using SD every day.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Google doesn't have control/equity/IP over the transformer paper.

A model is not a paper and the transformer paper isn't what keeps the lights on in Mountain view. (Nor alphago for that matter.)

Agree on the incredible name recognition, but that's a mighty fragile thing if not built on sound foundation. Even a slight breeze like this article can make it wobble

It'll probably work given how everyone is falling over each other trying to give AI-anything money, but still gives me strong dot com era vibes. Appearance first, substance perhaps later.

emadm7• 3 years ago

This is dumb.

We employed Eleuther team members as Stability AI employees/contractors and incubated them until the 501(c)3 was set up and we managed to bring in other funders too: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/stability-ai-hugging-face-...

I am on the board and delighted to continue to support their work as an independent organisation for LM evaluation, alignment and interpretability which is much needed.

Indeed though our approach was handing out significant compute for no control, no equity, no IP.

Anyone who has received Stability AI grants will be able to attest to this with multiple breakthroughs as a result, for example funding https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM, the work of https://github.com/lucidrains and others.

Similarly we funded the beta of MidJourney with a cash grant for compute without ever even floating asking for equity etc as it is a market-creating innovation.

At the time MidJourney was using cc12m_1, a model developed by one of our lead (employed) generative AI developers Katherine Crownson / RiversHaveWings (https://github.com/crowsonkb/v-diffusion-pytorch)

Our model is simply to take open innovation and create commercial variants of that (our stable series models) from scratch and on our own, plus variants of that for private data - https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1649152422634221593?s=2...

This means we can be hands off versus other funders and trust researchers and help them succeed, something others do not.

yawnxyz• 3 years ago

They should have interviewed the investors to understand where they saw the opportunity.

I think an ecosystem of users coming back to perform (and pay for) all kinds of generative AI tasks is totally worth the investment.

I can't figure out how Stability hasn't been able to make revenue though. Are they just not charging enough? Are they subsidizing everyone's compute?

PLenz• 3 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the deck?

babl-yc• 3 years ago

Why did this post end up getting flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand having critiques about the post, but stories about major AI companies fundraising seems on-topic.

ShamelessC6• 3 years ago

Unclear. I think flagging is actually done after a threshold of users click flag? Which seems like not such a great system given stories with potential conflicts of interest between the user base and moderation.

I recently saw a satirical post about vector databases get to top of HN and then drop to place 60 rapidly (no flagging in that instance).

I am trying to maintain an assumption of good faith with regards to moderation but lack of explanation on suspicious actions when it comes to stories with clear conflicts of interest between YCombinator/investors and the hn community don’t inspire confidence.

Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

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